Festival Review- Blue Ox 2025
Tucked into the pines of northern Wisconsin, just outside of Eau Claire along the Chippewa River, sits a great little music festival.
For a decade now, the Blue Ox Music Festival has been drawing national and regional bluegrass and Americana acts for three days in late June. Thousands of fans follow, a large portion of them camping onsite amid the trees.
It’s always been well run, longtime festgoers say. Sets start on time and sound great, the campgrounds are tidy and the showers are clean, the people are friendly and the vibe is impeccable.
The weather, though, can’t be defeated. Two days of rain turned parking lanes to mud at the start of this year’s fest. Fest officials were on it, spreading tons of gravel, but still some cars were getting stuck. On night one, a car stuck in a parking lane perpendicular to me gunned it, sending wads of mud flying through my open car window and splatting into the side of my head. I had to laugh, but that was my sign to pack it in and try again the next day.
A bigger disappointment came before that: a storm cutting short the fest-opening set by Chaparelle. A Texas-based band formed around the trio of Zella Day, Jesse Woods and Beau Bedford, Chaparelle combines hipster allure with traditional country and dashes of jazz and rock, wrapped in a gorgeous package. (Debut album Western Pleasure is indeed a pleasure.) Lightning forced the band to quit after just five songs, but thankfully those included the beguiling “Inside the Lines” and the irreverent “Baby Jesus.”
Fortunately, this wasn’t a Bonnaroo situation. Ninety minutes of rain unfortunately washed out Molly Brandt’s set, but longtime favs Horseshoes & Hand Grenades hit the stage a bit late and the evening’s other acts, including Sam Bush, played for the soggy crowd.
The rest of the weekend was a joy. The rain moved on, and sun came out. Fans danced to the music. Kids ran around and played with hula hoops. Soap bubbles wafted through the crowds gathered in the main concert bowl, set beside a small lake with a stage on each end. When a band finished on one stage, the next would start on the other stage almost immediately. Vendors and food trucks were a short walk away.
Another short walk away lay the idyllic Backwoods stage. Bands there performed in the shade of 100-foot-tall oaks and maples, with cloth sculptures of jellyfish strung in the air among them.
Here are some of the best things I saw:
Molly Tuttle
I was very interested to see how the crowd at the bluegrass-forward Blue Ox would react to Molly Tuttle’s shift away from the genre. Some fans on social media reacted with disappointment in early June when she released the first single, the profoundly pop “That’s Gonna Leave a Mark,” from her upcoming album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine.
After two albums and two Grammys with Golden Highway, Tuttle formed a new band this year that includes drums, electric guitar and electric bass. Blue Ox was only the sixth show with the new group, she said.
Tuttle wasted no time introducing her new sound, kicking off the set with two tracks from the upcoming album. Tuttle picked out a bluegrass-y acoustic guitar intro, and then the band roared into “Everything Burns,” storming right past pop and leaning into hard rock. “The Highway Knows” landed as a sunny pop love song. A cover of the Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow” featured some familiar picking on fiddle and acoustic guitar before Ellen Angelico dropped in with a massive riff on electric guitar. The crowd roared in approval, seemingly blessing Tuttle’s big shift.
Tuttle promised that she’s not abandoning bluegrass – even the poppy first single includes clawhammer guitar playing. And indeed “San Joaquin” and “Crooked Tree” are as stringy as ever, but “Dooley’s Farm” and especially “Where Did All the Wild Things Go” got an electrified punch-up.
Big Richard
If you had told me a folk band of fiddle, mandolin, cello and upright bass would do an absolutely killer cover of Pink Floyd's “Time” that was sinister and revelatory, I wouldn't have believed you. Big Richard nailed it, mapping David Gilmour’s guitar solo onto the fiddle.
The four-woman string band from Colorado might seem gentle, but their music and wit hit hard. “Caleb Meyer” is a dark tale, punctuated with a cello solo. They topped that with a scorching cover of David Olney’s “Millionaire,” a tale of a wicked man who will do anything, no matter how bad, for money and power. “Well, I found myself in a good position / To buy myself some cheap politicians / Bought myself a big election / That's just how it went, boys, now I own the president.”
They promised to play that one at the Kennedy Center (it’s true, the show is July 24 – “they didn’t read our bio”), dressed in drag as the Founding Fathers.
Tall Tall Trees
Easily the biggest surprise for me was Tall Tall Trees. Just one guy – Mike Savino – filters his heavily modified banjo through a series of electronics – he calls it the Banjotron 6500 – making it sound like an acoustic guitar, fiddle, heavy metal guitar and anything else with a string. He adds to that with a mini keyboard – Casio SA-46, $49.99 – and from this modest setup produces a dizzying array of sounds.
He live-loops percussion and melody lines, building a song in front of our ears that’s sometimes Hendrixian, sometimes Middle Eastern, sometimes bluegrass-ian, sometimes... I just don’t know. I couldn't possibly assign this music to a genre except for maybe the best one: Make Cool Sounds.
Hurray for the Riff Raff
The setlist for Hurray for the Riff Raff drew mostly from the terrific “The Past Is Still Alive,” one of the best albums of 2024, in my opinion and that of at least one artist I talked with at Blue Ox. Those songs about life lived not just on the margins but beyond them, wrapped in a cushy pillow of music and voice, hit like a punch in a velvet glove. In “Hourglass”: “I always feel like a dirty kid / I used to eat out of the garbage / I know I should probably get over it / somehow it feels like I’m still in it.”
Alynda Segarra’s hushed vocals cushion the raw ugliness and sweeten the tenderness. The pastoral sweep of the songs played well in rural Wisconsin. The crowd sang along to “Buffalo” and cheered the “nothing can stop me now” line in “Snake Plant (The Past Is Still Alive).” And we hollered in recognition at “there’s a war on the people, what don’t you understand?” later in that same song.
A few more things I liked:
St. Paul and the Broken Bones: The big – very big – soulful rock sound of St. Paul and the Broken Bones. With a three piece horn section they put to good use, St. Paul provided the fattest and loudest sound of the fest. “I hope you're enjoying our bluegrass music,” frontman Paul Janeway said, cheekily.
Long Mama: The sharp, wry lyricism of Long Mama on “Poor Pretender” (“I told you I'd be just fine / When you set me down gently.... / I'm sorry, babe / I'm a poor pretender”) and “Half Love” (“Don’t want to be your half love, baby / Your half flame flickering out on your broken stove”).
The Wildmans: The virtuosity of sister-brother combo the Wildmans, who started as child prodigies in the Appalachian area of Floyd, Virginia, and later trained at the Berklee College of Music. Their music similarly ranges widely, rooted in bluegrass but venturing into Americana, jazz and even, on their debut album, Bach.
Awful Purdies: The accordion-cello cover of Tom Petty’s “Yer So Bad” by folk quintet the Awful Purdies. And I love their sharp, sometimes a little bit naughty wit. How can you not like a song about someone being an “extra kind of girl... extroverted and extra perverted... some may say that I'm kind of a lot / but when I have fun I give it all I got.”
Bugs: There were none! Three days in the damp woods and I got nary a bite from a mosquito or tick.
